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<FONT FACE="Verdana">This has been of serious concern to me the whole of my professional life. Although I only mention it when pressed — because of the viciousness and the distortions and the ridicule — my theoretical construct of the linguistic postulate is a way to operationalize the Lee-Sapir-Whorf (Dorothy Lee got seriously written out) in a way that did not lead to the ranking described below and in a way that seemed to me to get at what they-all were attempting to make understood. It was also a way for me to discuss the languages I was working with without getting those ranking reactions. It also takes the focus off of vocabulary — far too easy a game to play — and onto perceptual patterns. And there, if you please to play the ranking game, linearity and singularity don’t come off quite so nicely as fat dictionaries do. Grammar in so many Ndn languages is so beautiful and complex and can leave the rankers feeling a bit humble. Not bad.<BR>
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MJ<BR>
website: http://grove.ufl.edu/~hardman/<BR>
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On 04/25/2006 12:37 PM, "Ann Rowe" <AEROWE@AOL.COM> wrote:<BR>
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</FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT SIZE="2"><FONT FACE="Copperplate Gothic Light">In a message dated 4/25/2006 8:02:51 AM Mountain Standard Time, MiaKalish@LEARNINGFORPEOPLE.US writes:<BR>
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</FONT><FONT FACE="Arial">The discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vicious, is still ongoing,<BR>
and is very detrimental to the view of American languages and the people who<BR>
spoke them. I would speculate that one of the great difficulties in<BR>
revitalization is that American languages are considered "worthless" because<BR>
they ostensibly "lack so many concepts". So as you can see, understanding<BR>
what Whorf was saying maybe be critical to language revitalization in a lot<BR>
of ways: Documentation, conceptualization, analysis. <BR>
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I once sent out an email asking if there were math words in Ñdn languages,<BR>
and you sent back a note telling me that I would be able to find them using<BR>
Western concepts and direct translation. This is in fact correct, but what I<BR>
began to realize from this and other responses is that despite the vast<BR>
physical representation of math and science around us, there is almost none<BR>
in the collected languages. And I said, Now why is that? <BR>
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Hello, everyone and I hope you do not mind my barging into this discussion with a minimally informed opinion. I am not a linguist by training, merely a historian.<BR>
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But the two highlighted sentences in Mia's posting really jumped out at me. The first clearly and absolutely deals with the question of subjective valuation by the majority culture in a multicultural society. Rather than moving toward understanding how those concepts are perceived in the culture which created the language, and then to an understanding of how they would be spoken of orally and in written form, the presumption becomes that, if the concepts are not readily apparent from the presumptions of the majority culture's interpretation of how they should be presented, they are concepts that are "absent" from the cultural base of the "other" language. It is, in essence, cultural imperialism at one of its worst phases as Mia noted in the debate to which she was referring. <BR>
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In relation to the second statement - obviously, the reality could be as simple as this: perhaps native peoples felt no need to separate out science and math from the rest of living the way that western European heritage cultures have. That would, in fact, mean that the language(s) would not require additional terms. This would be very similar to the idea of "kaona" in Hawaiian language use - meaning has layers of depth and its interpretation goes beyond mere comprehension of a single word - context, construction, and the purpose of the statement (why and for what it was created) all modify the meaning of that single word. Western European cultures had to create the words to describe the concepts once they determined that math and science would exist separately from other activities in daily life. <BR>
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Just a few random ideas. <BR>
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Ann<BR>
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